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Last week, I had another of my lovely coffee dates with my two mentors. We decided to try a new cafe and our new selection was LOUD. So through shouts and huh?'s I learned about a wildly enlightening concept: dayenu.

Florence, one of my mentors, is Jewish and as I was telling her about plans for my blog (more on that later), she responded, "Oh, so you're talking about dayenu?" This is where the "huh?" came in.

Florence continued by saying that dayenu is a Hebrew term that literally translates to "it would be enough." I'm not Jewish so I'm not going to expand too much, but the translation itself was enough to set my wheels turning.

Dayenu, in a word, encompasses the feeling I have been processing and formulating for the past year. The idea is this: No matter what happens today, it would be enough. If you have beer with a friend, it would be enough. If someone compliments you, it would be enough. If you spend today alone, it would be enough. Whatever it is, it's enough.

In dayenu, Florence gave me a word, albeit not from my own cultural tradition, to express my inexpressible.

Many places around the world have already celebrated pride this year, with many events taking place in the UK over the next month. Belfast Pride takes place this weekend and for the first time in a couple of years I'll be attending. There is an almost carnival atmosphere with some great events lined up every year and it never fails to disappoint on an entertainment level, but pride never fails to cleft me in twain; and here is why.

I have a major issue with the name of the event: Pride. Remember when you were younger, and you'd mention a recent achievement and that one sarcastic person would retort, 'What do you want? A parade?' This is very much how I feel about pride events. What do we have to be proud of? I'm not proud of the fact I'm gay, but that doesn't mean I'm ashamed. What it means is that I don't consider my sexual orientation to be a defining feature of my personality. It almost feels like we're flaunting our innate homosexuality at everyone else going, 'Hey, hey you! See me? See all these colors? I'm different from you. My people are so special we need an annual parade!' To me that isn't pride, that's arrogance. We should be remembering the years of hardship people had to endure to allow us the freedoms and rights we have now. We should be continuing our fight for the rights we don't yet have. We should not be ogling at semi-naked men dressed as angels and disco balls atop ridiculous floats and treating the day like a mini-festival. When it comes down to a basic level, we are no different than anyone else, so please stop pretending we are.

If the suffragettes marched today, do you think they would do so out of vanity? or the promise of some mediocre Gaga tribute at the end? Of course not. They marched to make change, it seems pride parades these days march to get laid, or at least drunk. I'm not saying do away with pride. I'm saying lets refocus and actually use it to get our voice heard further, to bring about change. If we're gonna be proud about something, why can it not be something actually worth being proud about?

This is my first entry written in English. I'm doing this as a way of improving my writing skills, so please forgive any language inaccuracies and errors!

This past year I have been working with this framework, Symfony2, in a large-scale project involving several high-end technologies. We chose to use this framework to develop our base code because the team already had an expert PHP and other framework experiences. After a year of writing a lot of the code that the application currently uses, I can't help but write some personal thoughts about it.

Much has been said about this great framework. It is now safe to say that Symfony2 is the best PHP framework out there, for many reasons. I find the next the most important ones:

One of the things I realized after reviewing many frameworks is that they lack excellence. This is just a reflect of the real-world PHP programming scene: most of the developers out there lacks excellence too. If you think about it, the PHP framework scene just respond to what kind of developers make use of the language.

Meditation has a wide range of physical and mental health benefits. My interest in it as a religious/spiritual activity due to an intense fear of dying (assuming the possibility of the permanent extinction of consciousness), and a belief that the practice of zazen can lead to a direct experience ('enlightenment'/satori) which would overcome that fear of death. There is an element of faith in all of that, although Buddhist literature is full of inspirational descriptions of enlightenment experiences (starting with that of the Buddha's), providing a basis for that faith.

I believe that meditation is the most important activity we can undertake. The following quotes are my touchstones for that belief:

"To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget
the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the
universe."

Dogen, Genjokoan

Those who try zazen even once
Wipe away beginning-less crimes.
Where are all the dark paths then?
The Pure Land itself is near."